Hi Dr. Nash. Colin Receveur, SmartBox Web Marketing, bringing to you this Swift Kick web critique of your website, of your website presence. If you give me just a few minutes here, I’m going to run through. I’ve got your website up and I’ve got a few searches of some things I’ve found on you on the internet here.
I’m going to jump in and get started right here on the front page of your website. The first thing I see, the website I think is very aesthetically pleasing. I really like the colors. Very warm, inviting colors. The images here, while they are stock photography and a lot of patients realize that, they are warm images. You’ve done a good job of selecting demographics, picking out a variation of ethnicity groups, ages, male, female, children. So I do like it.
However, this entire area here, if you can see when I right-click, it says Adobe Flash, which is horrible, really, for any kind of website that’s been designed in the last five years. Adobe Flash is not compatible with Google, with any of the search engines. They are not able to read it all. They are not able to index it. Any Apple devices, your iPods, your iPads, your iPhones are not able to play Adobe Flash. It’s basically a technology that has been incompatible for a number of years, but there really wasn’t an alternative, so a lot of people used it. And now that HTML 5 and some other newer technologies have come out, they are actually pushing it out the door, and there is something out there that is able to replace Flash now. Whereas, in the past, yeah there was some stuff out there, but it wasn’t as good as today.
So anyway, I would strongly encourage you to get rid of this Flash on your website. It kills your search engine rankings. It kills your user experience. Because if you look at this on an Apple device, it’s just blank here.
Scrolling down the site, I like the video you have here. I’m going to play it. You have a nice little intro video here. I would like to see this video up here. Put something warm and inviting that jumps out and grabs people right here at the top. You’ve also got some real estate up here at the top. If you notice, the website is kind of smooshed in on the sides. You’ve also got a lot of real estate up here in this white area that’s unused. I would encourage you to move things up.
If you think about the newspaper, you’ve got the above the fold that refers to their highest value real estate. Above the fold on your website– everything in the screen that loads before you can scroll. You’ve got a lot of space here that we can put some great information in. Maybe some social media buttons, maybe putting the phone number up here. Instead of using a reverse contrast here, generally we try to stay away from reverse contrast. What you have basically in the whole website is a reverse contrast, where you have a darker background, lighter letters, as opposed to having a light background and dark letters. It’s difficult for the eyes to read in a lot of cases.
Let me skip through here and I’ll go on to some more pages. I saw you had a dental video page here. I always like to comment on these, because these are so popular, but they are really not good from a marketing perspective. When patients come to your website, they are going to choose you based on your expertise, based on the value you offer, based on your price, or based on the fact that they just like you; you’re just a nice guy or they like your staff.
Patients don’t want to know about how you prep for a crown or how a dental implant goes in. And if they do want to know that, there is WebMD, there is Wikipedia, there are these titans of information out there that they can look that up in.
What I would encourage you to do here with your video area is to offer video that connects with your patients in a way that you couldn’t do otherwise. You know, explaining how an implant for a denture works, or showing these pictures, or how you do deep root planting, or an implant goes in, or how you prep for a porcelain inlay. There’s always one in here that shows how you prep for a crown. Well, there’s a cap.
That kind of stuff, the clinical aspects is not what drives the buying decision. I would encourage you to put stuff in here that’s going to develop a connection, that’s going to foster that relationship with your patients. Again, I know pro sites is really big on this, and they think this is just the best thing since sliced bread. But I truly think it’s horrible to have this clinical stuff on your website. So that’s my take on that.
Going into your meet the practice page, meet the doctor, I love the family pictures here. Very warm, very inviting. You’ve got a little video here that talks about it. And your bio is in normal people words. Sometimes you look at a dentist bio and it just has lists, and lists, and lists of accreditations and continuing education and memberships, and it doesn’t really say who you are as a person. So I like that it’s a down-to-earth feel here.
I love the office picture. I love the little excerpts here. Something we like to do is actually to put little videos of each staff member next to their biography, or have them say this on video. It really adds a warm feel to your website and lets people get to know you more.
As far as all your procedure pages, I’m not really going to touch on those a whole lot. I want to keep this short to respect your time and not let this drag out. But generally, all the procedure pages are good. You have to let people know what you can do. Make sure you are putting out additional content on these procedures so that Google is indexing you. Content is the currency of the search engines. More content, unique content, that’s how you get ranked higher.
Now here you have actually a link going off your site, which is OK usually, but you’ve got two problems here. One is the link doesn’t work. And two, your webpage just disappeared. So for the person that was on your webpage, now you have taken them off your webpage. Most dentists go, “Oh, well they could click back and go back to your webpage,” but that’s another step they have to take.
I would make sure that when you are doing links off your site that you open those links up in a new page, not in the existing page here. Your webmaster can show you how to do that. It’s very simple. It’s like seven letters from the keyboard and code. It takes five seconds to put together.
Sedation dentistry. Fantastic that you offer that. The oral conscious sedation, so much fear, especially in the older generation that have had bad experiences earlier in life.
Six month smiles. I saw you had some before and after’s here. Make sure you get some full face photos. The teeth photos are great and dentists love teeth, so they put photos of the teeth. But patients want to see your whole mug shot. So I would encourage you to do some before and after face photos and post those up, because that’s the connection people get to you when they are looking around and they go, “Oh, wow. Look how he really transformed that person.”
Inevitably, what also happens is for the before pictures, the patients come in and maybe their hair is not done or their makeup is not on. But when they come back in for that after picture, boy, they are spruced up and they look like a million bucks. The after pictures always look stellar. So I would encourage you to do that as well.
Headaches here, I saw you had this ad. Fantastic. That puts a promotion out there. You might put some kind of tag here on a value or an offer—free consultation, $99 consultation—some kind of hook that’s going to give people something to chew on, so to speak.
50% of your people are going to make their buying decision based on price. 50% of them are going to make it based on value. So I would put something in there that hits on whichever way you want to sell it. We tend to push more towards value because, of course, that’s how you can charge higher fees.
Smile gallery. Love smile galleries. I would hope that, again, you would get some full face photos in here. The stuff of just the teeth, nobody looks at this stuff; very rarely. And when they do look at it, they don’t know what they’re looking at. I’m going to look at the dental implants. Oh, people don’t want to see this. This is horrible.
Showing people this gory clinical stuff with the pockets, and I’ve seen some pretty horrid stuff with puss coming out, it’s just not good stuff that you want to be showing. If somebody has a chipped tooth, or if you want to do a zoomed out shot of the before, or it’s just not so bad orthodontics or whatever, or they have a big metal tooth, that’s OK for an in-close. For a scared patient, a skittish patient, that’s certainly not helping your chances. This kind of stuff, oh man, I wouldn’t put that on there. But that’s my opinion from my experience.
Going into the frequently asked questions. You’ve got a lot of great information here. We like to turn the FAQ’s into a video section. Patients love to watch videos. It’s one reason why nobody reads books anymore. People would rather sit in front of the TV and be told rather than pick up a book and read it.
So we like to turn all the FAQ’s into videos. We see a ton of people viewing them. Of course we get them on YouTube. We get them ranked on YouTube, up on the first page of Google.
Same thing with your testimonials. I see you’ve got a number of testimonials here, which is stellar. Fantastic. I would tell you to flip-flop these. Put the text below the videos. Videos are more powerful. Let’s watch one of these and we’ll see how it goes.
I notice one thing right of the bat here. You’ve got “afraid” spelled wrong, which is something a patient is going to notice.
Attention to detail. I’ve heard practice consultants talk about simple things—mow the grass, have a well-kept office. Present yourselves in a professional way how you want to be perceived. Spelling, grammatical errors, that kind of stuff goes to speak to that. Let’s finish watching this video.
The one thing I notice here is the camera shaking, which it feels like maybe you’ve got it on a tripod. It seems to only shake side to side. But I would really try to tighten that up, because that’s kind of annoying to see the camera vibrating.
Also, I don’t hear a microphone. It sounds like you’ve just got maybe a little flip-cam. You can get some very, very inexpensive microphones that will hook into the audio input. I know I’ve got a small camera that I travel with. It was like $350 for a little handheld camera. I’ve got a hardwire microphone that was like $40. And the audio is tenfold better than when you have the microphone 10 foot back from the camera. You run the microphone up and clip it on their jacket. You can put a very inexpensive video kit together that will get really good testimonials.
The lighting here actually looks pretty good. It looks a little bit bright here. Blown out is the technical term. But you’ve got pretty good lighting.
The other thing I’d tell you to do is to scoot the subject, your patient, away from the wall. When you create depth between the person you are shooting and the background, it looks fantastic on video.
If you’ve got a little bit bigger area, try to scoot your patient out from the wall a little bit and that will really appear nice in the video. Put maybe a little flower vase behind him on his left side or right side. You can really shoot some great videos for under $500 in equipment that is just super simple to operate.
Links and important information. I’m not so big on links pages. This was something that was really big in the late ‘90s when there were no search engines. If you wanted to find another website, you went to a website you knew, you went to their links page, and they linked to other places and you could find related items.
But for the past 10, 12 years now, Google came about in 2000, 2001, people just don’t care about links pages anymore. There’s not a whole lot of SEO value for you for linking to other people. In fact, there’s actually liability for you from an SEO perspective.
If you think of search engine optimization, if you think of what’s called link juice as a bucket, everybody that links to you is putting water in your SEO bucket. Everybody you link to is a hole in your bucket. The more water in your bucket, the more SEO your site has, the higher Google is going to rank you.
So if you are not creating these links properly, which I’ll look at it right now and tell you that you are not, these links here that you are linking to other sites on are actually bleeding off your link juice. So that’s something I’d just get rid of completely. Nobody cares about them. If somebody wants to know something about it, they’ll go to Google and search.
Offers. The quality dental plan, of course that’s getting big these days. I would encourage you to put your offers on every page. Don’t make somebody click here to find your offers. Put them down the side of the page. Make it very easy for them to get to.
Patient forms. Let’s make sure those links work. OK, looks like those links work. Good to have patient forms on there. Appoint requests, of course.
I would maybe get this simpler. Some of this, “best time to call”, I would probably get rid of everything I’m highlighting here, all these options. The more confusing something is, the more options there are, the more chances a patient just looks at it and goes, “I don’t know. I’m not interested right now.” And they go to the next thing.
Patients online have the digital attention deficit disorder—DADHD I call it. I would definitely get rid of this spam blocker stuff down here. There’s a lot better ways to get rid of spam if you are even having a problem with that. Most guys put a spam blocker on here and they really haven’t even had a problem. So I would encourage you to simplify that a little bit.
For your contact page, I would get rid of your email address here. You can post it, but what you are using here is what’s called a mailto link. These were very popular years ago. Well, they still have some use today for people that still use Outlook, or Apple mail, or whatever local programs on their computer might be.
The problem is, if they use Yahoo or Gmail or a web-based email where you have to open up your browser first, these links don’t work. So what I would encourage you to do here on your contact page is to put a form on here just like this. That’s going to allow people just to type their information in, boom, click send and it goes right to you. It makes it a lot easier.
I see your Facebook and Twitter. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I would put those right up here at the top. If somebody wants to go friend you on Facebook of Twitter, cater to them. Let them do it.
Driving directions. Now, you’ve linked to your address here, but you have not linked to your Google Places page. I would make sure you jump out there and claim your Google Places page and then link to that page. In fact, here is your Places page right here.
I would link to this page right here. Instead of going to just an address, send people to this page. They’ll be able to leave reviews. They are able to click right here and get directions. They are able to get more information about you.
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, yeah, put a little button up there for that, too, at the top of the screen.
Suggest categories. Go ahead and set up some categories here. I see you’ve got 69, 70 likes. That’s good. We don’t see a whole lot of business come from Facebook, just by its nature of how it works. Let me go ahead and like you. I’ll give you 70. Same on Twitter. It’s good to have it set up. You’ve got a few followers. I’ll go ahead and follow you there. But we don’t see a whole lot come from social media. I can give you a more in-depth explanation on that if you are interested.
Now, you do have two local places here that both look to be claimed. Both have reviews on them. Be careful with this. This is actually a violation of Google’s terms of service to have two duplicate listings that you’re working with both of them. If you did this yourself or you are working with somebody, make sure you get those merged together. It’s a pretty simple process, but if you don’t you risk Google suspending them both and getting stuff un-blacklisted, unsuspended from Google is like pulling teeth. No pun intended.
I also did a few searches on you. “Temecula dentist”. Found you fourth in the local. Didn’t see anything for you in the paid section and didn’t see you down here in the organic. Let’s try “implant dentist”. Find you here number one in the local again. Didn’t see you in the organic at all. Didn’t see you in the paid listings.
About 50% of your people searching are going to go to a paid listing and advertisement. 50% are going to stay over here on the left-hand side. So I would encourage you to get some visibility. If you don’t want to do the paid ads, definitely work on getting up here in the organic side. Getting in the organic isn’t fast or easy. It is very predictable if you use the right methods. You need to produce a lot of content and do link building. Those two things done with what’s called a White Hat tactic, which is the guidelines Google sets out; you are not doing anything deceitful or devious or illegal by Google terms. And you can get ranked up there in a reasonable amount of time. Content and links. That’s all it takes.
I did some more searches: “Guy Nash bad review dentist”. Couldn’t really find anything. “Guy Nash scam dentist”. I saw your website actually came up here when I searched for scam, which is good. Health grades, Yelp…let’s see what you’ve got going on here. Health Grades, don’t see any reviews here, really. Yelp, been hearing a lot of bad things about Yelp lately. I don’t want to say anything on video here. I’ve had a few clients that have had trouble with them. What I’m hearing right now is I would definitely steer clear or Yelp.
“Guy Nash review dentist”. Yelp comes up, Rate MD’s, Manta, Dr. Oogle. I don’t really see any bad reviews come up here, which is excellent. It feels like everybody has a bad review these days. It’s hard to please everybody. You know, you have 50 patients in your office a day. Inevitably, one of them gets upset that their insurance didn’t cover something and they post a bad review about you. So not having any bad reviews is pretty exceptional.
Let’s go back and look at Google Local “Guy Nash dentist”. Let’s see what reviews you are getting. You’ve got two excellent reviews on this one, six and seven months ago. Two years ago you had an excellent review. Yeah, looks fantastic.
I would get these filled out a little bit more. Get this listing claimed here. Manage it. Get a link back to your site on it. You don’t have to do a lot to generate activity on it, but it’s good to link to them.
That sums up my Swift Quick here. My big action items for you would be to redo the top of the site, get rid of the Flash. Get some more video on here. Video is huge to differentiate yourself to set you apart. Get some contact forms on here so it makes it easier for patients to contact you and get a hold of you.
Let me look at your search engine tags here. Everything looks good here. You’ve got Google Analytics here, which is good. Everything looks pretty good here in the source code. I would encourage you just to make those few changes. I think you can really have a killer web presence that will bring you a lot of new patients in.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. My number here is 888-741-1413. I’m going to put my contact information below the video. Have a great weekend.